LioT Part II: Violence & Crime

Violence is starting at younger and younger ages, the youth of today are growing up without good role models, they are not getting taught respect or responsibility at home and the country is slowly spiraling into a dark and dirty hole. If the violence in our society continues the way it is going soon it will not be safe to walk the streets at night without a gun in your pocket.

The problems as I see it are obvious, firstly the police are no longer respected in New Zealand a lot of this in my opinion has happened since the Traffic Officers got phased out, now that cops are being petty and having to control traffic as well they are seen as not doing their job properly and the government is more worried about them as revenue gatherers. Secondly our prison senetences are a joke, 17 years for murder??? and that is not counting that they can get out earlier than that for good behaviour after as little as 7 years. Our prisons are not tough enough, some of the criminals in prison have better treatment and lives than their families including little children on the outside. This is not right and something needs to be done about it. The soft punishments for crimes in New Zealand is starting to cause the violence...a huge number of criminals reoffend so obviously the rehabilitation is not working. So my system is simple...Sentences should be firstly a DETERENT to criminals, secondly a punishment and finally a rehabilitation, but this rehabilitation should be the last third of their sentence and no matter what they should serve out the whole thing from start to finish.

These measures would actually start to deter criminals from committing crimes. As far as I know from my experience at University it is widely accepted that Humans are cost/benefit rationalising beings, therefore if the cost is too high they are less likely to commit the crimes in the first place.

But at the same time something needs to be done to make sure these kids have positive role models from an early age, even if this means communtiy leaders working within their communtities directly and noticing at risk kids early on and helping the parents to keep them out of trouble and setting them on the right path for life. we have heard in the news lately that it is the fault of Alcohol, well this is a poor tradesman blaming his tools. These criminals need to accept personal responsibility for their actions. But while saying it is not society's fault that these criminals are doing this, I think it is now society's problem and we have to deal with it as a group.